Psycholinguistics I - Fall 2016

Schedule

Mondays & Wednesdays, 12:00 – 1:30
1108B Marie Mount Hall

The course will cover a series of broader topics, each spanning a few class meetings. The focus will be on in-depth discussion of key findings and puzzles. The schedule will adjust to the flow of the discussion.

• August 29th – Introduction
• August 31st – Speech perception – learning
• (September 5th – Labor Day, no class)
• September 7th
• September 12th
• September 14th
• September 19th – no class (CP at NSF)
• September 21st
• September 26th – class delayed
• September 28th – Speech perception – electrophysiology
• October 3rd – Word recognition
• October 5th
• October 10th
• October 12th – Word recognition in context
• October 17th
• October 19th
• October 24th
• October 26th
• October 31st – Word production
• November 2nd
• November 7th
• November 9th – Generalization
• November 14th
• November 16th
• November 21st
• (November 23rd – no class, Thanksgiving closing)
• November 28th
• November 30th
• December 5th
• December 7th
• December 12th

Requirements

This is graduate school. Your grade should not be your top concern here. You should be aiming to get a top grade, but your focus should be on using the course to develop the skills that will serve you well in your research. There will be no exams for this course. The focus of the course is on reading, discussing, writing and doing throughout the semester, and hence your entire grade will be based upon this. If you want to get the maximum benefit from this class (i.e. learn lots and have a grade to show for it at the end), you will do the following …

1. Come to class prepared, and participate (15% of grade).

Being prepared means having done some reading and thinking before coming to class. Writing down your initial thoughts or questions about the article(s) is likely to help. Although many readings are listed for this course, you are not expected to read them all from beginning to end. An important skill to develop is the ability to efficiently extract ideas and information from writing. Particpating in class discussions is valuable because it makes you an active learner and greatly increases the likelihood that you will understand and retain the material. You should also feel free to contact me outside of class with questions that you have about the material.

2. Think carefully and write clearly in assignments (85% of grade).

The assignments will come in a variety of formats. In lab assignments you will get hands-on experience with various research techniques in psycholinguistics, plus experience in reporting the results of those experiments. In writing assignments you will think and write about issues raised in class and in the assigned readings. The writing assignment may sometimes be due before the material is discussed in class: this will help you to be better prepared for class and to form your own opinions in advance of class discussion. In your writing it is important to write clearly and provide support for claims that you make.

f you are worried about how you are doing in the course, do not hesitate to contact me. Email is generally the most reliable way of reaching me.

Grade scale

Note that even in the A range there is plenty of room for you to show extra initiative and insight. The threshold for A is deliberately set low, so that you have an opportunity to get additional credit for more creative work.

Teamwork

Written work should be submitted individually, unless the assignment guidelines state otherwise or you have made prior arrangements with the instructor, but you are strongly encouraged to work together on labs and homeworks in addition to group projects. Academic honesty includes giving appropriate credit to collaborators.  Although collaboration is encouraged, collaboration should not be confused with writing up the results of a classmate’s work – this is unacceptable. If you work as a part of a group, you should indicate this at the top of your assignment when you submit it.

Assignments

The assignments for the course consist of a mix of shorter and longer written assignments, together with practical lab assignments. The lab assignments are a major component of the course, and are designed to give you first-hand experience with experimental and computational techniques used in psycholinguistic research. You will have around 2 weeks for each lab assignment.

Lab #1A – Classic speech perception paradigms (due September 14th)

Lab #1B – Probing higher level encoding of speech (due October 3rd – to be confirmed)

Lab #2 – Lexical access

Homework #3 – Word recognition in context

Notes

These are links to the slides used in the course. But note that they include some things that were not discussed in class, and in many cases the slides do not do justice to our extensive discussions in class.

… to be added …

Readings

Introduction

Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [chapter 1]

Jackendoff, R. (2002). Foundations of language. Oxford University Press. [chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, chapter 4]

Lewis, S. & Phillips, C. (2015). Aligning grammatical theories and language processing models. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 44, 27-46.

Marr, D. (1982). Vision. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [excerpt]

Momma, S. (2016). Parsing, generation, and grammar. PhD dissertation, U of Maryland. [Too long to read the whole thing. But dipping into the Introduction and framing for the chapters is worth the effort.]

Speech Perception, Learning Sound Categories

Maye, J., Werker, J. F., & Gerken, L. (2002). Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic perception. Cognition, 82, B101-B111. [Widely cited article, suggesting that distributional learning of speech categories is straightforward. We will discuss this at length. It’s probably not so straightforward.]

Stager, C. & Werker, J. (1997). Infants listen for more phonetic detail in speech perception than word learning tasks. Nature, 388, 381-382. [This is one of the primary readings for the section of the course on phonetic/phonological representations. A very short, but very important study. Why are younger infants better than older infants, even on native-language contrasts?]

Vallabha, G. K., McClelland, J. L., Pons, F., Werker, J. F., & Amano, S. (2007). Unsupervised learning of vowel categories from infant-directed speech. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, 13273-13278. [This is an explicit implementation of the idea that is implicit in the papers by Maye et al. 2002 and Werker et al. 2007.]

Werker, J. (1994). Cross-language speech perception: Developmental change does not involve loss. In: Goodman & Nusbaum (eds.), The Development of Speech Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp:93-120. [Useful for Lab 1. This paper reviews in more details the reasons why Werker adopts a structure-adding view of phonetic development.]

Werker, J. (1995). Exploring developmental changes in cross-language speech perception. In L. Gleitman & M. Liberman (eds) Language: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Vol 1 (2nd edn.), 87-106. [This paper is the best starting point for this section of the course. It presents an overview of Werker’s views on phonetic development up to 1995, including a straightforward study of her important cross-language experiments from the early 1980s.]

Werker, J. F., Pons, F., Dietrich, C., Kajikawa, S., Fais, L., & Amano, S. (2007). Infant-directed speech supports phonetic category learning in English and Japanese. Cognition, 103, 147-162. [Analysis of what infants actually hear. It is presented as an argument for unsupervised distributional learning, but I suspect that it shows the opposite.]

Cognitive Neuroscience of Speech Perception

Näätänen et al. 1997. Language-specific phoneme representations revealed by electric and magnetic brain responses. Nature, 385, 432-434.

Kazanina, N., Phillips, C., & Idsardi, W. 2006. The influence of meaning on the perception of speech sounds. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103, 11381-11386.

van Turennout, M., Hagoort, P., & Brown, C. 1998. Brain activity during speaking: from syntax to phonology in 40 milliseconds. Science, 280, 572-574.

Word Recognition

Altmann, G. 1997. Words and how we (eventually) find them. Chapter 6 of The Ascent of Babel. Oxford University Press. [A good introductory chapter.]

Marslen-Wilson, W. 1975. Sentence perception as an interactive parallel process. Science, 189, 226-228.

Marslen-Wilson, W. 1987. Functional parallelism in spoken word recognition. Cognition, 25, 71-102.

Simpson, G. 1994. Context and the processing of ambiguous words. In Handbook of Psycholinguistics, pp. 359-374.

Boland, J. and Cutler, A. 1996. Interaction with autonomy: Multiple output models and the inadequacy of the Great Divide. Cognition, 58-309-320.

Dahan, D., Magnuson, J., & Tanenhaus, M. 2001. Time course of frequency effects in spoken word recognition: Evidence from eye-movements. Cognitive Psychology, 42, 317-367.

Chen, L. & Boland, J. 2008. Dominance and context effects on activation of alternative homophone meanings. Memory and Cognition, 36, 1306-1323.

Kutas, M. & Federmeier, K. 2000. Electrophysiology reveals semantic memory use in language comprehension. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 463-470.

Lau, E., Phillips, C., & Poeppel, D. 2008. A cortical network for semantics: (de)constructing the N400. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9, 920-933.